I originally reported this bug in libtool: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=21309
but this actually seems to be a bug in AC_TRY_EVAL (or another macro it uses). Under Debian/unstable, with autoconf 2.69, I get binary data in the config.log for MPFR due to \1 and \2 in echo strings (POSIX says "if any of the operands contain a <backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined.", thus dash is not broken here). When doing "sh -x ./configure" (-x to get a trace), I get: [...] + nlist=conftest.nm + eval echo "$as_me":7267: "/usr/bin/nm -B conftest.o \| sed -n -e 's/^.*[ ]\([ABCDGIRSTW][ABCDGIRSTW]*\)[ ][ ]*\([_A-Za-z][_A-Za-z0-9]*\)$/\1 \2 \2/p' | sed '/ __gnu_lto/d' \> conftest.nm" + echo configure:7267: /usr/bin/nm -B conftest.o \| sed -n -e 's/^.*[ ]\([ABCDGIRSTW][ABCDGIRSTW]*\)[ ][ ]*\([_A-Za-z][_A-Za-z0-9]*\)$/\1 \2 \2/p' | sed '/ __gnu_lto/d' \> conftest.nm [...] In libtool.m4, this comes from: nlist=conftest.nm if AC_TRY_EVAL(NM conftest.$ac_objext \| "$lt_cv_sys_global_symbol_pipe" \> $nlist) && test -s "$nlist"; then the buggy output being done by AC_TRY_EVAL. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)